Orlando Ribeiro's travels

Luanda region. 1960. Making manioc flour. © CEGCEG
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Angola

AFRICAN SOLITUDE
The thicket is dense and hostile,
grayish in the crude light
that sketches the monotony of its branches.
Distant, the smoke of a burning ascends
- the road is nude, desert and desolate.
Only the ruddy flower of Erythrina
places a tender note in this uniformity,
discreet in the vastness where it blossoms.

(In A Colonização de Angola e o seu Fracasso, 1981, p. 9)